Friday, January 29, 2010

The Truth Tonight

I am not sure what this poem means. I guess it is true enough, that I think you women are more courageous than men when you get your shit together. I think you are more pain tolerant too. On the other hand, I also think you get a built in connection to the planet that lies deeper than we men get. I don't think you live longer on average than men because of your grit, but because of the connection. This alignment of woman and earth is on display when you give birth as the umbilical chord. When it is severed the woman child can find it again within, but the man child has lost something and he seeks it the rest of his life.

He will project it and invent patriarchal religion. Women tend to keep the mysteries when freed of patriarchal societies. But just as gay society shows now, there are men with enough woman in them that they don't fit the mold. I am not gay, but I do have enough feminine in me that I do not fit the mold. Somewhere in my twenties I stopped caring about that.

What I do care about, the yearning that I am left with ever since they snipped the chord and my foreskin, has bedeviled me, forced me to make up all sorts of crazy shit. At least I have gotten good at it and write a pretty good poem now.

Oh by the way, you women are not exempt. But if you yearn like me, that means you have enough man in you. :D

The Truth Tonight

If I had courageI would have been born female.I bargained carefullyand came out a malein this timezone, for this work.If I had more graceI would honor youwith crimson flowers to matchyour deep warm red blood.

16 comments:

Chrstopher, this is great!I love it. I went to an energy reader lately, and one of the things she said is that somewhere at birth i was disappointed to be born female. I have no recollection of that, but i do know i love my warm red blood :) It's my moon time now. And i will miss it when it ceases, for some strange reason, i don't know many women that like their periods like i do. Christopher! this is women's talk, how come i am talking to you :)

Please don't take this the wrong way, Christopher and other men who read this comment, but I have always felt sort of sorry for men just because they are not female. I think you articulate my reasons well, Christopher.

To Jozien - when you move to the next phase of your life, you will embrace that, too, for the new depths of wisdom your body will have earned.

Karen!! Please don't take this the wrong way. You've become a crone :D

My mother used to say, it takes a man to really see a woman just as it takes a woman to really see a man. She of course did not mean all men and all women. She meant the awake man, the awake woman. Actually she was saying this in terms of the novelist, poet, playwright. She said the best women in print are written by men, the best men by women. She was an English teacher.

Okay..since it is all people I know here (at the moment) and everyone is talking women talk... well, I am totally missing my moon cycle. :( I dream now of bleeding. I dream of pregnancy. AND I wake hot to touch and burning from the inside. So I yearn. My yearning is nearly an unbearable thing at the moment. Does that make me more a man now? I wonder.

Liz, I realized, after getting all deep about your questions that you don't really require answers from me. You already know and I know you do. I will only say that powerful medicine is a significant stress. You have spoken freely of that. So are powerful emotional states. You so clearly live within emotional storms.

Ghost, those pesky 5s. I just replaced my totaled Hyundai with a Mazda 5. I guess that's where it came from. Thanks for Emily, though I confess I often don't track my way through all her lines. I like them as sounds though.

I take no offense at being called a crone, believing that you mean it in the sense of the triple goddess, the wisdom of the waning moon. Emily, too, was in this aspect as she wove her poems, so I find myself in good company. Thank you, Ghost! You've given me an Emily evening.

I am both man and woman, and I would like to say a balance of each but they often offset each other. And as I get closer to losing this sacred period (not to me, dear sweet women - out out red stain!) I actually feel more woman. Isn't that quite the contradiction?

I find that in men such as yourself, if I could be presumptious for a moment, it is the bravery of self that suggests woman. And I'm not so sure it is fair to equate that with being female but so we do. A stripping down to self and allowing to be, to muse, to dig within, to be easy and soft - we see that as being woman. Whatever it is, it is what wins me to a man. It is what broaches the divide and draws me to him. Call it feminine, call it a deepness, call it art - he has to have it. I recognize that in myself now. I need a man of beauty. I have been lucky to know one or two.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.